Spirituality Was Never a Solo Practice: What African Cosmological Traditions Have Always Known

The wellness industry sells spirituality as a personal achievement. A morning routine. A meditation app. A gratitude journal. The implicit promise is that by turning inward — by developing an individual relationship with “the universe” or “a higher power” — a person can attain inner peace, soulful living, transcendence.

This framing is the product of a particular cultural moment and a particular philosophical lineage: individualist, consumer-facing, and largely stripped of the cosmological frameworks from which most of its practices were extracted. It is also, in a deep sense, a departure from the spiritual traditions it draws from most heavily — including African ones. In African cosmological thought, spirituality is not a personal achievement. It is a communal practice, an ancestral obligation, and a relational technology for maintaining the web of life that connects the living, the ancestors, and the unborn.

Àṣẹ, Nommo, and the Living Cosmos

In Yoruba cosmology, àṣẹ is the divine force that animates all things — not a distant god-energy to be accessed through personal practice, but the living power that flows through every person, every plant, every word spoken with intention, every ceremony performed with care. Àṣẹ is not something you develop alone. It is something you participate in, steward, and transmit through right relationship with the community and the ancestors who sustain it.

In Dogon and Bantu traditions, Nommo — the generative power of the spoken word — makes the cosmos itself relational. Creation is not a past event; it is an ongoing process maintained through language, ceremony, and communal practice. Every libation poured for the ancestors, every name spoken at the opening of a gathering, every proverb transmitted from elder to child — these are not spiritual exercises. They are acts of cosmic maintenance, keeping the web of life intact.

The Akan concept of sunsum — the personal spiritual essence — is never conceived in isolation. It exists in relation to the clan’s collective spirit, to the ancestors, to the Earth itself. What the wellness industry calls “developing your spirituality” — as though it were a personal asset — African cosmology would recognize as an impossibility. You cannot develop your sunsum in isolation any more than a single thread can constitute a cloth.

What Soulful Living Actually Requires

If African cosmological traditions were designing a “soulful living” practice, it would look nothing like a morning routine. It would look like this: knowing your lineage and being known by it. Tending to the ancestors — pouring libation, speaking their names, learning their stories. Participating in communal ceremony, where the spiritual work is done together and the healing is distributed across everyone present. Practicing reciprocity with the natural world — with the plants, the water, the land — as living beings deserving of relationship, not resources for personal wellness.

The liminal states that African traditions cultivated — through ceremony, music, prayer, and sacred space — were not means of personal transcendence. They were technologies for communal renewal: for strengthening the bonds between the living and the ancestors, for healing collective wounds, for restoring the community’s relationship with the forces that sustain life.

The neuroscience of ritual and belonging confirms what this practice always knew: the spiritual work done in community — synchronized, relational, embodied — has measurably different effects on the nervous system than solitary spiritual practice. The wellness industry’s individual meditation app is a pale extraction from a much richer tradition of collective spiritual technology.

Reclaiming Ancestral Spiritual Practice

This is not an argument against individual contemplative practice. Solitude, prayer, breath, and interior reflection all have their place in African spiritual traditions. The Sufi mystics of North and West Africa, the contemplative dimensions of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, the interior stillness cultivated in African Kemetic traditions — these are real and important. But they exist within a web of communal practice, ancestral relationship, and cosmological responsibility that gives them meaning.

Soulful living, in the African sense, is not the cultivation of a serene individual interiority. It is the daily practice of being in right relationship — with your ancestors, your community, the land, and the living forces that move through all of it. The soul is not a private possession. It is a communal inheritance, tended together, offered back in service. —MM

References

PMC: African Spirituality and Community Wellbeing

Yoruba Concept of Àṣẹ — Cambridge Africa Journal

PMC: Communal vs. Individual Spiritual Practice — Outcomes Research

Related Reading

• ‣ Between Worlds: African Traditions and Liminal Consciousness
• ‣ Yoruba Ori and Mental Health
• ‣ Music, Ritual, and the Science of Belonging
• ‣ Epigenetics and Ancestral Memory

Michele Mitchell is the Founder, President & CEO of Ubuntu Village Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit rooted in East Harlem, New York, with programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria. A writer, advocate, and community strategist working at the intersection of ancestral wisdom, public health, and community power, Michele leads Ubuntu Village’s work to center communities as the protagonists of their own healing. She writes from the conviction that science and spirit are complementary, that healing is relational, and that community is the medicine.